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From the Editor: Academic Freedom after 9/11
Lawrence Hanley
The publication in this issue of Academe of the report of the AAUP's Special Committee on Academic Freedom and National Security in a Time of Crisis follows through on the magazine's efforts to track the often confusing, rarely simple, and sometimes controversial situation of academic freedom and the profession in a new, post-September 11, era. The report is comprehensive and painstakingly deliberate. It focuses on the repercussions of the USA Patriot Act, on new conditions for the exchange of knowledge and information, and on incidents of possible injury to free speech and academic expression. The special committee's work underscores and vindicates the necessity of the AAUP's mission and its labors. It represents a major statement on the current circumstances of our profession and should probably be required reading for all faculty, students, administrators, and other interested parties.
Still, the findings of the special committee should not be read as separate from more persistent trends in higher education and the profession. Ultimately, the post-September 11 currents documented in the report will join with already well established pressures and forces on and within the academy. This issue of the magazine returns to some of these less immediate, more chronic realities.
Budgets and restructuring, for example, inform Forrest Colburn's thoughtful reflections on the struggle for academic legitimacy undertaken by ethnic studies departments over the past several decades. The academic need for ethnic studies was born in the heat and turbulence of the late sixties and early seventies. What does it mean then to achieve "normal" departmental status, Colburn asks, in a new era of budget tightening, the preprofessionalization of curricula, and cost-benefit analyses of institutional missions? The reorganization of American higher education also supplies an important context for Lowell Barrington's arguments against the current movement for "learning assessment." Academic integrity may be a major casualty of current pressures to quantify faculty work and student learning.
Indeed, as Xin-Ran Duan describes in his article, Chinese higher education is rapidly "normalizing" along American and other western models of the university. Although the benefits are many, according to Duan, academic freedom may not be one of them. The Chinese example implies an important test case: can one enjoy American-style higher education without American-style academic freedom?
The recent judicial activity around affirmative action and the perennial debate about higher education's commitment to fairness and opportunity supply an important context for Anthony Lising Antonio's exposition of the necessary reciprocity between diverse student bodies and diverse faculties. Racial diversity in the student body, antonio explains, also helps to sustain, in myriad and often subtle ways, the project of diversifying the faculty body. Yet, what will happen to this project as institutions modify their affirmative action policies and as stingier public budgets force institutions to rethink their missions and trim their hiring?
Finally, to dispel excess gloom, we include Luis Martínez-Fernández's utopian proposal for academic trading cards. Embracing the heady winds of commodification and commercialization, Martínez-Fernández invites us to join the world of professional athletes, Pokemon, and more recently, Yu-Gi-Oh. There are probably worse fates. Feel free to let us know of your candidates.
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